Appreciative joy rooted in Chinese culture: Its relationship with strengths in values in action

ABSTRACT

Appreciative joy refers to feeling happy for others with appreciative and unenvious attitudes, which is a strength-like construct emphasized much more in Chinese than in Western culture. The current study provides an initial exploration of appreciative joy’s relationship with the strengths in the Values in Action (VIA) framework. Study 1 with 516 online participants showed that appreciative joy was positively correlated with the VIA strengths and provided an incremental explanation for subjective well-being and envy after controlling for the 24 VIA strengths. Study 2 recruited 559 readers of a Chinese novel (The Dream of the Red Chamber) and showed that appreciative joy was associated with the perception of the outstanding strength of characters in the novel after controlling for interpersonal strengths. These findings illustrate both similarities and differences between appreciative joy and strengths in VIA and hold multiple implications for research on appreciative joy, positive psychology and cultural diversity.

KEYWORDS:

• Appreciative joy
• positive psychology
• strengths
• VIA-IS (Values in Action Inventory)
• Buddhism
• four immeasurables
• subjective well-being
• culture
• East Asian

Acknowledgments

XZ designed the study, XZ and YS analysed the data, XZ and YD collected the data, all authors discussed the results and wrote the article. Dr. Oei is now an Emeritus Professor of University of Queensland and also a visiting Professor of James Cook University, Singapore. This work was supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities under Grant 2018NTSS39.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [2018NTSS39].